


Stillbirth

by taichara



Series: Blood and Fire [3]
Category: Saint Seiya
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-09
Updated: 2014-11-09
Packaged: 2018-02-24 17:45:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2590565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taichara/pseuds/taichara
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To be remade, one must first be unmade.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stillbirth

He gasped and shivered and spit out blood-filled froth, crouched on his knees in the small stony cavelet he had been returned to so very many times.

By this point, he thought, the rough and shadowed walls were surely stained blackened crimson with his blood, the blood of all who came here before him.

This was the land of the damned, and in it were monsters.

-*-

First there had been the endless hours, days ... months, years, of abandonment in this broken land, where the sun was a killer and the night held death.

He'd learned to kill, then, fought ceaselessly to live, to survive, to feed himself and drag the life from the ones who would strip his own away.

And then he was lean and hard, a willow cast from iron and sleek as the very asps that lurked amongst the stones; with the rusty black coils of his hair curling around tense, narrow shoulders, his eyes empty and glittering.

He had shown the monsters that he could survive.

It was not enough.

-*-

Plucked away from the stone-toothed barrens he had lived in -- and bled and starved and killed in -- for so very long, he had been sent down the rough stone slope of the tiny cell in the darkness.

And there he waited, til they dragged him out again into the dark night, and demanded to know his name.

He had spit it at them, defiantly -- 

And they descended upon him them, cold and black of carapace, striking at him with fist and claw and ice and thunder, like the creatures of death his inner eye declared them to be.

Broken and bleeding, a wretched useless waif he had been called then. And he was thrown, with the greatest of contempt, within the shadowed cell.

For an endless time it continued so; in the unknown hours of day he fought and kicked and howled his defiance, and at night they came and demanded his name.

And as he answered, they descended like blackened angels, til he was torn and lashed and bleeding, and tossed aside to await the night again.

-*-

It went thus, his flesh torn and the muscles beneath growing wiry and tight with bitter anger, til one night the monsters came and he fought back with something never known before; not simply with fist and strike and bloody bites, but with glittering lashes of his own bitter rage.

His anger was kin to the asps of the stone he had killed in, and it ensnared and bit deeply into his assailants, the shimmering coils tainting midnight-dark;

And as he stood there panting, bruised and bloodied and pale as the moon, the great tusked beast come to him from amongst the horde, and demanded to know his name.

He stared back at the bulging black eyes, the curving black tusks, and had no answer.

-*-

That night he was returned to a different, colder cell.

The night after that, they came with their chill shadow-knives, and they bled him.  
The bled him with their knives and their sharp white teeth, and bore the blood away and left him shivering and limp on the rough dark stone.

And so it went, for unknown days; and his name did not return to him.

He no longer cared.

-*-

Thus it was that he was kneeling now, head low and breath ragged, when they came without their knives. And he lashed at them with the sharp bitter barbs of his anger; but they brushed them away, and broke them.

He was taken from the cell of bloodied stone, and led to a winding coil of smooth glass, black as night, lined on either flank with the the damned in their black shells.  
He wavered on his feet, and spat bloodied froth; and then he saw what lay before him on the smooth dark glass of the plinth.

It was black as pitch, as the fanged beast's eyes. Its own dead eyes glittered at him dully, like those of a shadow carved from death itself. It lived, though it was dead.  
In his confusion he saw that it was shackled, chained; and, propelled by that confusion and a cold, enthralling call, he staggered forward one unsteady step.

It was upon him then, free of its confinement and opening up like an obscene flower of death and glassy rot. He screamed his fury and struck at his assailant, ribbons of slashing biting anger glancing off it smooth black shell.

Though he fought as if one mad, the dead thing engulfed him, twining his biting lashes in its own embrace and drawing them -- and him -- into itself.

Where the cold dead thing closed and clamped around him, he felt a fire so cold it ate down to his bones, his soul, his withered self. as it closed around him, the freezing pain chewed down deep and drew blood of its own, and he shrilled his denial of this thing to the dark and empty sky.

And it was over.

-*-

He was crumpled forward, bracing himself on hands encased in a cold dead thing, spitting black blood onto the smooth altar-stone. His chest heaved as his vision slowly cleared, and the terrible cold nestled close and comforting as an asp.

It was the most natural thing in the world.

The great fanged beast drew near to him, and he reared up with new-found strength, eyes clear as ice and dead as cold black stone; and saw the beast for the mask it was.

And it asked him if he knew his name.

He drew back his lips in a thin snarl, and spit the words like bitter blood. 

He knew.

" _Black Andromeda._ "


End file.
